The only honor captured by Alfred at Cambridge was a prize for his poem, “Timbuctoo.”  The encouragement that this brought him, backed up by Arthur Hallam’s declaiming the piece in public—­as a sort of defi to detractors—­caused him to fix his attention more assiduously on verse.  He could write—­it was the only thing he could do—­and so he wrote.

At Cambridge he was in the habit of reading his poetry to a little coterie called “The Apostles,” and he always premised his reading with the statement that no criticism would be acceptable.

The year he was twenty-one he published a small book called, “Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.”  The books went a-begging for many years; but times change, for a copy of this edition was sold by Quaritch in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-five for one hundred eighty pounds.  The only piece in the book that seems to show genuine merit is “Mariana.”

Two years afterward a second edition, revised and enlarged, was brought out.  This book contains “The Lady of Shalott,” “The May Queen,” “A Dream of Fair Women” and “The Lotus-Eaters.”

Beyond a few fulsome reviews from personal friends and a little surly mention from the tribe of Jeffrey, the volume attracted little or no attention.  This coldness on the part of the public shot an atrabilarian tint through the ambition of our poet, and the fond hope of a success in literature faded from his mind.

And then began what Stopford Brooke has called “the ten fallow years in the life of Tennyson.”  But fallow years are not all fallow.  The dark brooding night is as necessary for our life as the garish day.  Great crops of wheat that feed the nations grow only where the winter’s snow covers all as with a garment.  And ever behind the mystery of sleep, and beneath the silence of the snow, Nature slumbers not nor sleeps.

The withholding of quick recognition gave the mind of Tennyson an opportunity to ripen.  Fate held him in leash that he might be saved for a masterly work, and all the time that he lived in semi-solitude and read and thought and tramped the fields, his soul was growing strong and his spirit was taking on the silken self-sufficient strength that marked his later days.  This hiatus of ten years in the life of our poet is very similar to the thirteen fallow years in the career of Browning.  These men crossed and recrossed each other’s pathway, but did not meet for many years.  What a help they might have been to each other in those years of doubt and seeming defeat!  But each was to make his way alone.

Browning seemed to grow through society and travel, but solitude served the needs of Tennyson.

“There must be a man behind every sentence,” said Emerson.  After ten years of silence, when Tennyson issued his book, the literary world recognized the man behind it.  Tennyson had grown as a writer, but more as a man.  And after all, it is more to be a man than a poet.  All who knew Tennyson, and have written of him, especially during those early years, begin with a description of his appearance.  His looks did not belie the man.  In intellect and in stature he was a giant.  The tall, athletic form, the great shaggy head, the classic features, and the look of untried strength were all thrown into fine relief by the modesty, the half-embarrassment, of his manner.